BOOK REVIEWED: Joseph Cermatori, Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022.

The ultimate denigration of ornament has often been attributed to the 
famous modernist architect Adolph Loos, although he never said the 
famous words explicitly in his startlingly racist and misogynist 1908 manifesto “Ornament and Crime.” Nevertheless, his statement in that essay, that “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects,” captured a prejudice that adorns popular notions of modernist aesthetics to this day. Smooth, functional, opposed in every way to the useless, excessive aesthetics we call baroque.

Joseph Cermatori begs to differ. In this sophisticated comparative study of four high modernist philosophers (and in some cases producers) of culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, and Gertrude Stein, Cermatori convincingly shows that baroque aesthetics, and specifically its distinctly theatrical, queer character, haunt modernism as its unacknowledged guiding...

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